38 - Why Willpower Isn't Enough: A Nervous System Lens on Nutrition with Timothy Frie

Ashley Ihemelu  0:01  
Hi. It's Ashley and Jess with the wellness reality check. We are two health practitioners, moms and best friends, bringing a dose of reality to the nuanced topics of Holistic Health. Hey, y'all, welcome back to the wellness reality check. Today, we're joined by Timothy fry a leading voice in the intersection of food, brain health and psychology as a neuro nutritionist, nutritional psychology researcher, public scholar and educator, Timothy digs into how what we eat impacts how we think, feel and behave, with a passion for translating complex science into actionable insights for everyday wellness. Timothy is all about empowering people to harness the power of nutrition for better mental and emotional health. We explore the fascinating connections between food brain function and psychological well being with Timothy fry, welcome Tim to the podcast.

Timothy Frie  0:59  
Thank you. What an intro.

Jess Aldredge  1:02  
She writes. Amazing intros. She just she should write everyone's bios.

Timothy Frie  1:08  
Thanks for having me. We're so happy you're

Jess Aldredge  1:10  
here. I've been following your work on Instagram for a long time, and I know is originally drawn to it because of a former eating disorder that I've had, and I'd never really heard of anybody talking about nutrition and diets and chronic illness and kind of how those all interplay with our own well being and our own way that adults approach food and diets and nutrition, I think you have one of the most unique experiences and information that you share out there. So we're going to dive in today about all things neuro nutrition. So first, we just would love to hear your background and kind of how you got into this field, and how your own personal experiences with trauma and different attachment styles and your own neuro divergence, and how those have all played into where you are today, and how that shaped your information?

Timothy Frie  2:03  
Yeah, well, I mean, everything that I'm doing today is fully informed by my own life experiences as someone who has struggled with all the things that I'm now helping people with, and has struggled to learn as a practitioner, all the things that I'm now teaching other practitioners. So for me to really fully answer that question, we do have to kind of go back to September 2, 1992 when I was born. And, you know, I grew up in a little town called Felton, Delaware. And it was a very kind of stereotypical town, like off of a Stephen King movie. It was like, you know, one intersection, one elementary school. Everybody knew everyone we lived on land that my family owned. My great grandfather was a farmer. Our neighbors lived on his farmland. My uncle lived there, you know, my family was also very impoverished. The home that we lived in was this dilapidated mobile home. It was overrun insects and rodents and mold, and we were 45 minutes away each way from my pediatrician, my dentist was in New Jersey, you know. So I saw from a very young age what it was like to live in food insecurity and lack of access to healthcare being in this rural area in America. And I saw the toll that that took on my family, a very extensive health history in my family, everything from addiction to autoimmune disease to cancer, heart disease, heart attack, stroke like just check all the boxes off. You know, I'm filling out that health history form, and I saw the toll of that on my family, and just kind of was very intuitively in touch with that and the stress that that had on my parents, especially, you know, I was abused and neglected as a child and did not know it at the time, spent the majority of my teenage years and most of my 20s this mindset of like, oh, The things that happened to me in the past didn't matter. And you know what? What happened happened, and they're not impacting me now in the future, but wow, that is not, that is not the case at all. And you know, we'll kind of get into what that looks like more. But I was always very interested in psychology and understanding why my mom did the things that she did, and why my grandparents did the things that they did, and why people in my family treated each other the way that they did. So always had this special interest in psychology and behavior. Ever since I was a kid, was always reading like the encyclopedia sets the human behavior in the psychology section, and trying to understand things so kind of self studied abnormal psychology and human development secretly as a teenager and when I was in middle school, among many other things, when I started high school, I decided to go to a vocational high school and actually studied nursing for a couple of years, and thought that was the direction that that I wanted to go. I had a full scholarship studied nursing right out of high school, and two months after I graduated, I started working in a non invasive cardiology lab in my community hospital, while the rose colored glasses about health care in America came off very quickly, like it's a joke, but I say this very seriously, I truly did not realize going into health care that other. People were not as passionate about understanding other people as I was. I thought everyone in healthcare had this same like autistic special interest in people and medicine in the body and the brain. So that was a very jarring experience for me to realize that no these are just other human beings that for whatever reason, ended up in this career or chose to, you know, pursue this career path. So I saw, you know, the way that healthcare workers were treated. I saw the way that the systemic shortcomings resulted in health inequity and people not getting the care that they need, or people just getting completely lost in the system. By the time I was, like, in my early 20s, I was completely burnt out, like I wanted nothing to do with the healthcare system. Again, I thought, if this is what I've signed up for, then I've made a really big mistake in my life. So changed directions entirely with my career. I ended up working in the real estate industry and the corporate venture capital, private equity side of health education for several years. Ended up getting a psychology degree, and, you know, was working 5060, hour a week. So I was in front of my computer constantly. And I was supposed to be this, like, young, healthy, fit guy, you know, I was doing all the things, going to the gym six days a week and eating healthy, which, you know, had orthorexia, muscle oriented disorder, eating binge eating disorder. We'll get more into that. But I was dealing with this, like, mystery diagnosis, you know, I could not sleep. I felt completely run down and exhausted all the time. It's so many other things going on, issues, my skin, immune system issues, and was bouncing around from doctor to doctor, trying all kinds of different supplements, trying all kinds of different elimination diets, therapeutic meal plans, therapeutic diets and things, tracking everything, logging everything. You know, get on this hamster wheel. And, you know, was in and out of the, er, a few times, you know, with with hypertensive crises, thought I was having a heart attack multiple times. And cardiologists and neurologists, immunologists, you know, just on the treadmill of the American healthcare system eventually ended up in the hospital for four nights. I had myocarditis and infection in my heart. And it was the first time when things kind of started to come together for me, because it was like this groundbreaking revelation, like maybe the stress of all of this was having an actual impact on my immune system. So I ended up shortly after that hospital stay, because everybody was perplexed as to why I would have myocarditis as this again, quote, unquote, young, healthy guy, I ended up stumbling my way into a functional medicine medical doctors practice and oh my gosh, like it was never experienced anything like that before in my life. Someone spent, you know, an hour and a half with me, asked me about my sleep and my stress and what was going on at home and, you know, my perception of my body, and was talking about psychoneuroimmunology, which was like, Whoa, you know, that is, that is the perfect intersection for, you know, my interest. So at the time, I was like, wow, functional medicine. This, this is the future. This is the way I need to learn more about this. So I ended up that following year, completely pivoting my career again and going back to grad school for a master's degree in Human Nutrition and functional medicine that same year, or the year prior to that, actually kind of dumbed up my timeline here a little bit. But the year before, I was hospitalized for those four nights, my grandmother passed away, and that's when things really kind of ramped up for me, and I now know everything that I was experiencing was very much the neurobiology of grief. And, you know, we can get more into that, but so I ended up going back to grad school. And while I was in grad school, I was, you know, I had always self studied, you know, was very interested in neuroscience and nutrition, and was kind of, you know, Not to disparage my training. And I had really great training and education, and learned a lot, but there were so many gaps between human behavior and nutrition behavior and understanding what's going on in our body and our brain as it relates to how we interact with food. The same year that I started grad school, you can see how dense all of this was. I'd started trauma therapy the first time. Now I'd been in therapy for at that point, kind of jumbled my timeline, but I started going to therapy when I was 15. Never really had access to a trauma therapist. Also started eating disorder treatment for the first time. Also learning, you know, taking graduate level courses on nutrition, and I feel like my entire perspective of my body and other people's bodies just just changed. And, you know, I didn't learn anything my graduate training about nutritional behavior or Nutritional Neuroscience, and I never even heard of this field up until, I think it was my been about a year or so into grad school, I was writing a paper on the role of omega three fatty acids in concussive injury recovery in school age athletes. And stumbled into a paper, stumbled across Dr drew Ramsey's work. He's a nutritional psychiatrist, and kind of published one of the first papers of here's like the neuro nutrients. You know, micronutrients influence brain health and the nervous system. So I found Nutritional Neuroscience. And I was like, okay, psychoneuroimmunology, Nutritional Neuroscience, I have found something here. And I was just completely fascinated with that in my own research, kind of stumbling around, still trying. Piece my own health together. In doing my own research with the neurobiology of trauma, I realized that all of the same regions of the brain and a lot of these different connective networks in the brain that influence our appetite and our emotional regulation and our behavior as it relates to how we make decisions about our body, those are the very same regions of the brain that are most negatively impacted by traumatic stress. What a huge thing. Nobody learns that like, you know, that's something there's no competencies for that. That's not a standard subject matter to have expertise on at any level across any profession. And to me, that was just like, Wait a minute. It was another one of these perspective shifting moments for me. So, you know, when I graduated, I ended up studying at two different universities, did some postgraduate work in the neurobiology of trauma and neurobiology of attachment. It was taking kind of these news courses and studying public health and interdisciplinary health sciences, but also still working for health education company and seeing these profound gaps in training and everything, kind of finally made sense to me. I'm like this explains society. Like this explains nutrition care, the healthcare system, and it explains so many of the things that people are struggling with. So when I opened my first brick and mortar nutrition practice, I kept seeing it over and over and over again, this impact of trauma. Most people had no awareness of it, just a lot of these like unconscious trauma responses and kind of define what that is. And people were coming to me telling me their story that was unique to them, but it was a story I'd heard time and time again. You know, they had similar upbringings as Maine. They experienced childhood trauma. They were diagnosed with some sort of chronic or autoimmune disease. After a major life transition, they hopped on the functional medicine train, diet to diet, supplement, supplement, test to test, app to app, you know, just started this whole thing, and they are still like, I don't know what my nutritional needs are. I don't know what to eat. I'm distrusting my body. I'm disgusted with my body. What to do, you know? And the average doctor, the average dietitian, I would even say the average functional nutritionist, or, you know, functional medicine doctor, they're not prepared to to sit with people and sort through all of this, because it's not something that you can just serve up to people with a protocol. You know, there's no trauma diet protocol. This work takes a lot of time and patience and compassion and sort of transmuting of responses and emotions, if you will. You know, one thing kind of led to another, and then, you know, I founded this, this training organization, about a year ago. Is the timing of this podcast recording. And this all started with me just posting a link. Started developing the training. Posted a link on my Instagram for people to fill out, or a Google form to request information if they were interested. And now we're about to be proved by several organizations for continuing education credit, and I think next year, we're probably going to enroll over 200 people into this program. So we've been incredible. I also founded the National Center for Neuro nutrition, which we're hoping to launch in September. It's been very slow, gradual, painfully frustrating process.

Timothy Frie  13:01  
I really wanted to bring this care to people. So yeah, that's, that's, that's me, and that's this in a nutshell. Wow,

Jess Aldredge  13:08  
thank you for sharing all that with us. My goodness, can you kind of walk us through what neuro nutrition is, what it means, and how it does differ from what you said, like a functional nutritionist or your general nutrition RN, what are some of those differences? Just

Timothy Frie  13:22  
to be clear, I definitely did not coin the term neuro nutrition. It did exist in the literature before me, but the field of neuro nutrition as a practice, as an interdisciplinary field for practitioners, is very new and novel, and coming up with that framework is something that I just kind of assumed responsibility for. Neuro nutrition. If you were to Google it, you'll get a definition that basically says something like it's the study of how different nutrients and dietary supplements influence the nervous system. And that is true. I have a little bit of a different definition of neuro nutrition to bridge a few different disciplines together. I essentially see it as the study of the bi directional relationships between how the nervous system influences how we eat, and how we eat influences the nervous system. It's kind of this intersection of three different fields, nutrition science, specifically like precision nutrition, nutrigenomics and clinical nutrition and neuroscience. So behavioral neuroscience, Nutritional Neuroscience, obviously cognitive neuroscience and psychology, notably like health psychology, cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, because I feel like one thing to study the effects the nutritional biochemistry and neurochemistry or nutritional neurochemistry, but what about the behavior that actually drives us to eat? Why do we eat the way we do, and what makes what drives our eating decisions? And that's what I think is overlooked in practice, and it's overlooked in a lot of clinical training and education programs. Education programs, because it's all about, I say this all the time. It's like matching symptoms with supplements and maladies with meal plans and dysfunction with diets. And I'm like, all we're doing is playing whack a mole here, you know? And I think as practitioners, if we really want to understand neuro nutrition, and we want to understand this by. Directional relationship. We need to be able to create some sense of what I call neuro nutritional fluency for people. People need to learn how to identify their actual nutritional needs through feeling and experiencing and being connected to their body, and learn how to meet them in ways that are within their means and capacity, regardless of what's going on in their life. And we don't really teach people how to do that. Practitioners don't even learn how to do that. We're just kind of, you know, matching things up. We give people some recommendations, and we hope for the

Ashley Ihemelu  15:29  
best. You describe most nutritional behavior as unconscious and shaped by early life experiences. How can someone begin to recognize and kind of gently shift those patterns, because, like you said, we're very unconscious of it, and practitioners aren't even educated in how to handle it.

Timothy Frie  15:47  
Yeah, so this kind of brings us back to trauma and like, the culture of how we view our bodies. I'll try to answer this concisely. I'll start by saying there is a researcher. He's a nutritional psychology researcher. I've followed his work for years. His name is Dr Brunstrom from University of Bristol in the UK, and he has proposed this term called nutritional intelligence. And he published this paper, which, for me, was one of these, like, Oh my goodness. Like, Yes, I'm on the right track with things here. And he posed the question, is the human nutritional intelligence underestimated? And he asked that question because his team and he had been doing research for years looking at basically how people, including children, make decisions about what to eat and when and how and why. So his team have coined this term of like, expected satiety, so how human beings determine a portion size? Okay, is this going to make me full or not? Is this enough? And we have this innate ability to make nutritional decisions based on what we're experiencing in our body. The problem is we're living in this society, and we're living in this existence that we have all these neurobiological mismatches between what our brains and our nervous systems and our bodies are equipped and prepared to do, and then that's against what is actually expected of us now, and the reality for most of us, just speaking for folks in America here, our number one priority is to ensure that we have food and housing and can pay Our bills, and that consumes, like the majority of the energy in our body and our cognitive capacity. And you know, we don't have caregivers who know there's no like generational transmission. Here's the nutritional intelligence my young one, you know, like nobody's passing that on to us. So we have a society that requires most of us to be very disconnected from our bodies. You know, whether you're someone who is spiritual or, you know, energetic of you know your perspective or philosophy of your body. When I say connected to our bodies, I just mean aware of those relationships between what's going on in your body and what's going on outside of your body. And what are the patterns? What are the themes? What do you know about yourself? How do we do that? You know, nobody teaches us how to do that. So becoming more conscious of your nutritional needs and develop and tapping back into your innate nutritional intelligence really just requires noticing. It's very hard for a lot of people, especially when you've experienced trauma, because there's a lot of things happening in your brain that make it difficult for you to do that. It's not even a matter of choice or decision. You can have the conscious awareness of, okay, this is a thing, but what does that actually look like in practice? My hope is that through this neuro nutrition education, I still don't even have the answer for that, but I hope to give practitioners framework and starting points of access for people. So to answer your question, you know, it really depends on the person. You know, one thing that I always ask is, what is accessible for this person, or where can they access their body? So for some people, you know, one thing I ask of pretty much everyone that I've worked with, and you know, I teach this to practitioners, is building a nutritional awareness, and we do that through finding rhythms and patterns very simple things like we've heard of, like food mood logs and things like that. But we don't really even need to be aware of, like, all the macronutrients, the micronutrients and all these things. Can you ask someone for one or two or three days to set a timer on their phone for an hour, to take 30 seconds and just make a note of this is the time. This is what I'm doing. Here's what I notice about the energy in my body. Here's what I notice about my appetite right now. Here's where I'm at, and here's what I'm doing. And I have never met even somebody who's been dieting for years, and even other healthcare practitioners have gone through this with me, and they're like, holy shit. Like, I did not realize that every single day I am hungry between one and three, and I'm eating lunch at 1130 and I'm wondering why I'm hungry between one and three, why can't I just change my lunch? So, you know, there's, there's an example of, you know, these very small things I think, get lost in. Weeds when we're it's like all the protocols and the meal plans, the diets and trying all these things. It's like, do you even know when you're hungry? What does hunger feel like to you? How do you respond to hunger? Do you have different types of hunger? Do you know how to differentiate a craving from hunger? Do you know the different difference between satiation and being actually satiated or satiety? You know those are two different things. So it really depends on the person where to start. But I think we need to look at the big picture and just ask the question, like, how is this accessible to this person? How can they enter their body, and does it feel safe for them to do? So

Jess Aldredge  20:34  
that all makes so much sense. And I'm just wondering, you know, listening to all that in the media, on social media. In the wellness space, there's so much messaging that says we all have the same 24 hours in the day. You just don't have willpower. You're making excuses. We all are capable of making these choices. Taking that all into consideration. What do you have to say to that messaging? I

Timothy Frie  20:58  
hate it. Absolutely hate that. So, yeah, I mean, it's this post. I've made it numerous and will continue for the rest of my life, sharing my perspective on this because, not only because it goes viral, but it's because it's something I really want people to understand. We all have this 24 hour concept. Every single person, though, is completely different. We all have different capacity and support and education and literacy and resources and different upbringing, different levels of resiliency, different levels of levels of literacy. You know, we're all completely different. Some people might say, Well, my Life wasn't easy, and I was able to, you know, go on a diet and lose 100 pounds, or, you know, whatever it is, you know, people always want to argue with me about this on social media. I'm like, right? And that's great. That is because everything that you have experienced up to your life, up to the point where you had capacity to make the decision to engage in these behaviors are conducive to you doing that. Not everyone has or needs to have that same experience. The other thing that I think about, it's a very unpopular opinion for me, you know, like bodily autonomy and true freedom of decision making is important to me, and I don't think that exists for anyone alive today, but we talk about like, food freedom and eating intuitively. And, you know, autonomous decision making with your health. But it's also like, Well, you got to eat this way, and if you choose to engage in something that's harmful, well then, no, that's not the type of freedom I'm talking about. You know, like we do a lot of policing nutritional decisions and perspectives of health. For me, I kind of have, like, this harm reduction approach, and it fits so well the neuro nutrition, because for you, as a practitioner to meet someone where they're at, you have to have the capacity in your own nervous system to tolerate the difference that you might have with the person you're working with who teaches us how to do that. So if you are working with someone, or whether you're a practitioner or not, someone has health values or a health environment or a different nutritional exposome than you do, you need to be okay with that. You can disagree. You can have a completely different perspective. You cannot support the decision making, but you need to accept that that is the reality for that person. And, you know, factoring in trauma and the underlying neurobiology of all this, that's something else that I think people, even people are neuroscientists and psychologists, it's like this isn't a common connection or thread for people to be able to follow here, every decision, every choice, every thought, every emotion, has a neurobiological underpay. There's things happening in our brain that have been influenced one place or another by our food choices and by the way that our body is responding to what's happening outside of us. So to answer your question, we all have 24 hours in a day, but the circumstances in context of those 24 hours is going to look different for everyone. And I think we need to stop being so angry that we need to accept that everyone is not we are not all uniform, and everything that we experience is not a shared experience.

Ashley Ihemelu  24:02  
It makes so much sense to me, because I think of someone that has experienced trauma being somewhat out of touch with their body as maybe a survival skill. But how might early chaos or inconsistency around food lead someone to restrict restrictive diets or disordered eating later in life, even if they feel safer now, what is propelling their choices?

Timothy Frie  24:26  
Yeah, so let me. Let me zoom way out here. So let's go back to this question. Like, why are we eating in the first place? Why does a human being need to eat? I think all of us intuitively know that we need food to survive. If we were to ask the majority of people like, what is nutrition? They think, well, it's the food that you eat that's your diet, the food that you eat, when you eat it, how you eat it, how you like it, cook. Those are your dietary preferences. Nutrition is a cell science. It is the study of what our cell needs to sustain and create life. That's what nutrition is. The fact that we don't know how to meet our nutritional needs with our life is. Contingent and dependent upon nutrition. What an injustice we don't think about that, you know, like it's so nobody teaches us how to eat and make sure that we can survive. And then, you know, we've been conditioned by, like, the biomedical, you know, industrial complex, where it's like, oh, you know, that's not necessarily important, that it depends and this and this and that no we need and deserve to understand how to feed ourselves. Most of us, you know, we're really grappling with this mismatch of how to navigate nutrition from from the moment we're born, and our caregivers are grappling with it too. We have a kind of innate set of what are called Food seeking behaviors, so like foraging, hunting, gathering and then eating the food and terminating the meal, hunting and forging for us right now is like going into a grocery store scrolling on Instacart, or, you know, DoorDash, or, you know, an app, you know, whatever the grocery store is we're shopping at. We're in this like, super normal food environment where we have all of these, like simulated food cues, things that prompt us to eat, things that are sensory, that shape our food preferences and our desire to eat certain foods and when we eat them, and remember all kinds of hormones and things, neurotransmitters and all kinds of bi directional things happening in our body when we go into the grocery store and we're making decisions about food and the state of our nervous system and our biology at the time of making a Food decision is going to influence what we eat or when we eat or when we don't eat. I think it's fascinating something else where it's like, wow, really? Yeah, it's always happening. So, you know, we engage in these kind of like, primal food seeking behaviors, because hunger is a very primitive survival signal to the body. We're in an energy deficit. We need to resolve that energy deficit in order to sustain our life. So series of things that happen to create repetitive behaviors or positive valence, which is basically where our body is going, we need to eat. What are the things that we need to do, to hunt and gather and initiate a meal? And then once we start to get full, all kinds of other things happening, and different parts of the brain basically tell us, okay, we've had enough. Our energy deficit. Energy deficit is to a point now where we're safe again. We can continue living. Let's terminate this meal. Now, here's where trauma and stress comes in, especially early life. Stress and trauma a lot of the same regions of the brain, like I said earlier, that play some role in regulating our appetite and our ability to make decisions about food are most impacted by trauma. So one example is like the amygdala. All of us have heard about this. If we've heard about anything about trauma, it plays a really important role in detecting threat and encoding the emotional response of emotional salience of a stimuli. And when we talk about trauma, it's usually that really scary, big thing that happened, and our brain likes to hold on to that. The amygdala handles that. But it's the same with food cues. Food cues also get encoded through the amygdala, and that stimuli is processed through the amygdala, and we have these links to sensations in the body with food and with traumatic stress, we know one of the responses in the amygdala is what's called hyper excitability. So we have the sensitization, if you will, in the amygdala. This hyper excitability in the amygdala, and it can cause us to have like exaggerated responses to food cues. So we might have like a hypersensitivity to food cues. There's just a relatively new concept of food noise, which is like the constant internal dialog thinking and obsessive thoughts and ruminating about food. And we know that people who have experienced trauma, people who have ACE scores of typically or adverse childhood experience scores of four or more, you know, there's been some pretty solid associations between obesity and meeting the criteria for, excuse me, being overweight, and all the cardio metabolic conditions and health conditions that come along with that and experiencing this food noise. So I wonder like, okay, is that part of the hyper excitability in the amygdala could something that we experienced during our developmental years, and the neurobiological impact of that? Could it be so profound that it's still impacting us later in life? The answer to that is yes, this is the other thing to answer this question. Makes me think about this concept of predictive mapping in the brain, which you can just take that very literally, the brain making connections, going this happens, and when I do this, I can expect this outcome, the outcome mapping, and our brain uses that to help us navigate the world and navigate our experiences. When we experience trauma during a developmental phase where, you know, we just don't have like the context to understand the bigger picture of what we went through. The brain does the best it can, and we experience what's called a maladaptive neuroplasticity. So the brain creates these connections and these these maps, and it thinks it's, it's showing us the way, but it's kind of like this jumbled mess. We don't even realize it. And so when we become adults, we have all of these implicit learnings, all these things that we've unconsciously learned, all these neural pathways in our brain, and they've been connected to food and our body image, and we trust our body and, you know, hunger and all these things kind of this all gets turned. Realized. And I've made this explanation intentionally a bit convoluted, because it is, it is very convoluted, you know, like there is so much happening in our brains and our bodies that we do not realize. And I just think that, you know, not only do we need to know this, we don't need to know the terminology, but for me, at least in my experience, being able to name this and being able to go, okay, like, I just basically and everything I just described, like I've experienced too, you can kind of witness yourself, and you can hold yourself and unburden, you know, all the ways that we've internalized, all this blame, shame and guilt and fear about our relationship with food and our relationship with our body. This is her neurobiology, and what has happened to us is not our fault. There's a lot that we can do to grow and heal and recover and work through all this and engage in adaptive neuroplasticity, which maybe we can talk a little bit more about too. You know, we're not stuck with this. So that's one example.

Speaker 1  31:02  
I You're listening to the wellness reality check.

Timothy Frie  31:08  
The Wellness reality check.com.

Jess Aldredge  31:12  
Can you talk about how things might add up, like little T traumas? Maybe the way that your parents are, like their own food issues shape your food issues, or little T traumas around food that might add up to eating issues throughout life or later in life. I know for myself, early on, I had a stomach ulcer. So for me, I associated food with pain, and so that kind of became you know, a manifestation throughout my life, although that wasn't like a big T trauma, you know,

Timothy Frie  31:45  
I will say, I personally, I think the big T, little T model of trauma, like it helps people, give people context. But if we're talking about traumatic stress, it really, actually doesn't matter, you know, whether it's big T or little t, you know, we're looking at like the spectrum of the response. Is there something maladaptive? Is it? Is it invasive? Is it intrusive? You know, is it causing this person distress? So in the context of little T trauma around food, I use this term adverse food experiences very much modeled after like, you know, adverse childhood experiences. There's, there's five different categories of them, and I see adverse food experiences as all of these repeated exposures to an event or a interaction or a experience with someone or something somewhere, in some setting where we learn that the way that we eat or our food preferences are wrong, over and over and over again, those experiences become part of that predictive map too, and they create these implicit learnings, where we unconsciously learn to associate food with being unsafe, feeling like we're in danger, or feeling like we're threatened by someone, or feeling like our care and love and belonging is going to be withheld from us if we do a certain thing, or we're put in these situations at a very young age where we are rewarded for foregoing our preferences. And makes me think about the education system, you know, where you have no choice but to eat during these times, and if you don't eat, you're gonna be hungry the rest of the day and you want to have a snack that's not allowed, you will get in trouble and go to attention if you eat until the day. Hubs are, you know? Hubs are, you know. And it's the same thing with adults, you know, you we have these very strange workplace policies where sustaining our life, and the sustenance necessary for that is regulated, which is why I say we, none of us, have food, food freedom at all. You know, all of those, those little experiences create a foundation of our relationship with food. And I think a lot of people feel so much shame about how this functional, this relationship with food, has become for them, and for some people, it manifests into an experience where you'll meet the criteria for some sort of eating disorder, be it orthorexia or binge eating disorder, anorexia or bulimia, or, you know, arfid, or, you know, something else, muscle oriented disordered eating. You know, whatever it might be. And even the way that we treat those you know, when we when people have these stressful, maladaptive, dysfunctional relationships with food, it's very behavior focused. A lot of these treatments are, you know, it's very compliance oriented, and you're going to follow these rules, you're going to eat in this way. And at no point are we teaching people how to identify their nutritional needs or how to meet them. So we come out of even it's been my experience, you know, in eating disorder treatment, in trauma therapy, which for me, I could not imagine. Having not done the two simultaneously. I never would have recovered from my eating disorder had I not gone through trauma therapy, and had I not had the education. I don't know how people are recovering at all,

Jess Aldredge  34:41  
I somehow did. I had no trauma therapy and no nutritional education, and somehow came out of it. But it was like, but it was 10 years of my life that I didn't realize I was still in eating disorder. And it took me learning about nutrition and starting to work on trauma to understand, Oh, I was still very much in that, you know, because it was just like, as long as you get to 90 pounds, like. Like, you're good, and like, move on with your life. And that was my reality for a very long time.

Ashley Ihemelu  35:04  
And how eating disorders can morph. It can go from restriction anorexia to more orthorexia. And we see that a lot in the in the holistic health community, I believe,

Jess Aldredge  35:17  
well, and so much of it is weight based, right? As long as you weigh this amount, then you're good, like, just regarding your entire mental state and your approach to how you eat on a daily basis in your and these maladaptive behaviors, you know,

Timothy Frie  35:30  
it's like, if you can white knuckle your way through the if you're meeting compliance with the guidelines, you've been cured, you know? And that's it's not true, you know, when I think about people my own experience. So I was diagnosed with both autism and ADHD for my entire life. I'm like, wow, it's always been there. And during this interview, I'm very high masking, like I'm doing the acting like a normal person. That's how I've learned to show up in the world. But there was a lot of things that I internalize about the way that I eat and my experiences with my body that I didn't even realize. You know, someone with ADHD and OCD complex trauma and autism all these things, I didn't realize that these were, like, shared experiences. And the people that I initially sought eating disorder treatment from, they didn't know either, you know, there was nothing trauma informed or neuro affirming about my initial eating disorder treatment. And when I think about like, let's just use ADHD, for example, interoceptive blunting, or basically, difficulty interpreting or feeling and noticing an interoceptive signal, so something coming from within the body, hunger, thirst, pain, you know, an intensity to engage in some sort of behavior. Some people only feel that when it's so intense, and even when they do feel it, they have this other aspect of, you know, the the executive dysfunction to initiate the food seeking behavior, and that sets people up for poor nutritional health. So if you stack that on top of trauma, on top of maybe having IBS or Crohn's or diverticulitis or digestive disorder. Maybe you have, you know, food allergies. How the hell do you navigate all of that? You know? And it's very difficult, I think, for people to put all these pieces together in a way that doesn't, doesn't shame people, and then it causes them to have more bodily fear. The other thing that comes to mind with this is the difference between health anxiety and maybe there's some orthorexia there, versus somatic and bodily OCD. I have met at least a dozen people who never had a history of OCD. Basically just thought they had health anxiety. They knew they had orthorexia. They were trying to improve their relationship with food, but I would see this obsessive thinking and rumination and looping thoughts showing up in the recovery and healing journey. So the point I'm trying to make here is the things that caused the disordered eating are going to show up in the journey of recovering from the eating disorder or the disordered eating journey. So if Yeah, so you know, like for me, you know, I've always been someone who struggled with rumination and obsessive thinking. And you know, I had what I think, you know, was, was the worst thought complex of OCD, because my obsession was, if I'm not thinking about it, it's not important to me, and if I'm not thinking about it, something bad is going to happen. So my mind was like repeating everything. And I truly thought, if I wasn't thinking about it, then it wasn't important to me, and something bad was going to happen to me. So for me, that manifested through food. And it was like, Oh my gosh, if I'm not thinking about, you know, down regulating, you know, a clear factor kappa beta, and getting my il six levels really low, and eating all the food, sulforaphane and all the and it was, it was non stop, you know. And I hear how, like, wild, you know,

Speaker 2  38:38  
I think that's common. It's so distressing

Jess Aldredge  38:42  
to the person that's experiencing that. And I

Ashley Ihemelu  38:45  
think it's also with like the education piece, because that's the route that I took going through my Cert, my nutritionist certification. It was like almost I had so much information that I wanted to do everything perfectly, and I wanted to make sure I got all of my nutritional needs met. And how that can be a little bit of a slippery slope,

Timothy Frie  39:08  
yeah? I mean, for me, it was an over correction, you know, where I went from binging, okay? You know, always, yeah, I would say, since high school, since middle school, I was very diet conscious, like my and also my mom was dieting, you know, I would skip meals to lose weight in middle school. You know, also a learned behavior. You know, there's some other, you know, my own adverse food experiences. And then, you know, you get the social praise when you lose weight, you look a certain way, which I've never had before. Then for me, the pendulum swung the other way. It was okay. And now I'm this very like, six foot two, very tall, skinny, slim guy. I need to gain weight. I need to gain as much muscle as possible. And everything about my life came about becoming as muscular as possible. Protein, protein, protein, carbs, carbs, carbs. Lifting, you know, and by over the span of like, a year and a half, I went from 135 pounds 176 pounds in high school, like, everybody was like, Okay, great. Like you're an athlete, wonderful my body. I don't even want to look at my body, but I'm doing this thing for me. You know, my my core fear during that time was, oh my gosh. What if I lose this weight again? What if I become this person that people describe as skinny? What does that mean about me as a man and masculinity and, you know, all these things? And for women, I find that it's the opposite. You know, a lot of transgender people who are transitioning like they they're in this precarious place where it's like they have a body that they've learned is just socially not acceptable, and they truly believe, because of the diet industry and the supplement industry and the fitness industry and just society, that if I look a certain way and weigh a certain weight, I'm going to be happy. And 100% of the time that never works. You know that it is such a thing, you know, that has been done to us. And it's also very real that if you do look a certain way, people do respect you more, because we have all these biases and stuff internalized. But anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is, you know, when I kind of came out and start talking about my eating disorder, if you will. I felt very isolated as as a man, because everything you know, even the eating disorder or not the eating disorder, the intuitive eating space, the anti diet space, the haze and fat positivity, I felt like there wasn't really room for nuance. You know, because I went from I need to lose weight, I'm afraid to lose weight. I see how all this is unhealthy, but how can I take care of my nutritional health and not obsess about it and not I didn't know how to do that, you know, and that took a very long time for me with with neuro nutrition. And what I want practitioners, or even patients, like, if this is resonating with you, to take away from this is that the way through this is to develop that fluency with yourself and just see these bi directional relationships. Like, the first thing for me with overcoming binge eating was I had to be very clear about the triggers. Like, I didn't even realize there were triggers. I was like, Oh God, I'm just here we are again in the middle of a binge, you know. I didn't realize that I had to understand the context, you know, not just the content of my diet and and being able to feel what was going on with my body and build that distress tolerance and learn that I'm I'm not going to whatever. The thing is, if I, if I don't binge right now, and seeing that, wow, this is possible. Like, you can change the way you think. You can change your body. You can change your emotions, like, and do it in a way that's compassionate. You can't do this with compliance. It just it doesn't

Jess Aldredge  42:26  
work. Let's talk about the compliance thing, because I feel like, and this was your experience, that you found functional medicine, right? That's a lot of people's experience that are dealing with chronic issues. They find functional medicine or holistic health or functional nutritionist or whatever. And one of the first things that they do for you, or have you do, and it's very compliance based. Is the AFP diet, or you start counting macros, or you have to fill out a diet log that they analyze, you know, someone that's coming from a very obsessive background, or a background with an eating disorder, how important it is for somebody to choose, somebody that understands, you know, some of their psychology that's happening underneath the surface of just what they're eating on a day to day basis. Yeah.

Timothy Frie  43:07  
I mean, we all it is tough to know whether or not this person we're going to work with is going to be able to meet us where we're at and understand, you know, our food story, and understand how to help us traverse our food environment. I will say that even in in my own practice, there's nothing wrong with logging or tracking or building awareness. I think context is what's most important. There are a lot of people who and look to be very clear like, I appreciate the functional medicine model, the systems biology, the functional medicine matrix, the go to it, framework, all of these things. I think, in functional medicine, the systems biology approach to functional medicine, piecing things together and finding these relationships. So there's a lot there for people, but it's evolved. The commercial and industrialized version of functional medicine that most people are coming across is not actual functional medicine practice. You know, functional medicine is about getting to the actual root cause, which should involve a lot of experimentation and self curiosity and self exploration over a long period of time. When you go to a practitioner and you're given a list of supplements and a list of things to do and a plan diet, whatever, that's not functional medicine. You know, that's not functional medicine. That's, that's, I don't even know, you know what that is. It's just more of this, like compliance based framework. And to be fair, I do think that the system, you know, the healthcare system, the culture of biomedicine, here in America, it's conducive to satisfying these expectations that people have for these transactional, quick interactions. Police doctor, give me a pill. Police Docker, give a procedure, you know, to help me with this. And the reality is, everything cannot be solved with a protocol or with a meal plan or with a diet.

Jess Aldredge  44:43  
Your chronic illness, you know, kind of goes into this functional medicine world that becomes very compliance based. And what if you are somebody that really struggles with eating and your past history of eating disorders, you know, and how somebody could maybe choose a proper practitioner that would take those types of things into consideration? And help them to begin building awareness and versus getting stuck with somebody, like, I know for myself, like I walk in I, you know, past eating disorder and like, do the IP diet. And for me, that was music to my ears. Oh yeah, I get to restrict more. You know, it was just feeding my eating disorder even more in a positive, you know, health bow wrapped up in a bow. You know, I

Timothy Frie  45:19  
definitely think that, you know, there's a time and a place for therapeutic meal plans, even elimination diets. You know, there's a time and place. But I think what we're missing is, again, we're very focused on the content of the diet, and we're forgetting about the context of the diet. I have not once, and of course, I'm biased, because it's just my experience here as a practitioner and as a person, I have not once found a nutritional intervention that was more powerful than a nutritional behavior intervention, because the behavior shows up in everything you know. One thing that that I've helped a lot of people distinguish is like, are we having an actual intolerance to food, or have you conditioned the digestive sensations in your body to be become a fear response, you know? And then a lot of people also, because of all this fear mongering and misinformation and sensationalization and nutrition information, it's like, oh my gosh, I was just diagnosed with Hashimoto as I kind of cut out a wheat and dairy and corn and soy and it never eat sugar again. And I have to go keto, and I have to follow the AIP, you know, whatever the point in all of that is noticing your body and how it responds to the diet changes. You know, it's like, okay, we do an elimination diet if we're going to be mindful about reducing our sugar intake for what a day, whatever. What do you notice at the end of the day? What did you notice in your mind and your brain and your body and your nervous system? How did it feel doing that? How was it making food decisions. How was it reading those labels? What did you learn about the foods? It's the same with a lot of these logging exercises and tracking. You know, these apps make money by us continuing to log and need the app, but we need to gain insight from the logging. Are we learning? Okay, this, okay, this six ounce of chicken breast is 120 calories, whatever. Okay, great. I have learned that. That's what? Six ounces of chicken breast, that's 120 calories, not, oh my god, if I don't log it, I'm gonna be out of control with food, and I'm not gonna know what to eat. And I'm gonna have to, you know, and that's what happens, though there's so your response to food, and a lot of people don't realize how much of their tendency to respond with fear and panic and rumination can be rooted in trauma for a lot of people, and I think that even the most well intentioned practitioner can unintentionally see every like the situation I just described, or maybe both of you might have experienced this. You're seen as like an engaged, motivated patient, someone who wants to do all the things. And when I see that, I always again, what's the context here? What has this person been through? Why are we so engaged? And why do you say yes to everything that I recommend

Speaker 3  47:59  
compliance? Yeah,

Timothy Frie  48:01  
and, and also to add this necessary layer, layer of nuance here, to close out this, this response here, it's very long winded, but you know, there are many medical conditions and circumstances where certain restriction and elimination is important, you know. And I don't want to, you know, negate that. And I do think that there are people who are okay to the extent that they're able to be okay with themselves with a lot of monitoring and a lot of logging and a lot of restriction. But again, it's not universal. Some people have the cognitive capacity to track and log, and it really is helpful for them, and perhaps they will never in their lifetime be able to overcome this self distrust, and we have to be okay with that.

Ashley Ihemelu  48:45  
I keep thinking about also how marketing around food or food accessibility or hyper palatable foods or quick options are also playing a role keeping us confused and out of touch with our bodies. Could you speak a little bit more on all of those things that kind of can get in the trenches of who's helping us from a bigger

Timothy Frie  49:13  
perspective? Yeah, just full body goose bumps, this question, who's helping us, who's harming us, you know? And what are their intentions? And how do we come to learn that all this is okay? You know, we all are living in a very I think earlier, I used the term like super normal food environment. There are a lot of engineered cues in our food environment. And I use the term neuro nutritional exposome to describe the totality of the factors and variables and experiences and events in our life that influence our neuro nutritional behavior, and all of the behaviors that we have around food and our interactions with food. A lot in the exposome is is harmful to us. You know, because we have this, still have this evolutionary mismatch that I talked about earlier. We don't really know how to navigate our minds and our bodies in this environment. Nobody really teaches us this. Most of us, you know, depending on your eggs, like we were just born during this time, where it's like, it's normal to have all this advertising and all this bright, flashy packaging and mascots and artificial flavoring and, you know, 80 grams of sugar and a 16 ounce drink, you know, and all these things. I think that's disgusting, you know. I think it's, it's such an injustice. And the one, one thing here that also comes to mind is a lot of people will we talk about right now in 2025 in America, food policy and SNAP and WIC and, you know, access to ultra processed foods and all these things is very contentious, you know. And it's, it's, it's a lot, you know, as someone who grew up in food insecurity, my family did not need to be infantilized and told, Well, you know, live in a rural area in a food desert, and you don't have access to these fresh foods, so you can just eat all this bullshit. You know that these food companies have whipped up in creating a lab we didn't need that. You know, in my opinion, nobody necessarily needs or deserves the processed food. Acknowledging the nuance that there are processed medical foods, medical nutrition therapy, then people will say, Well, what about the people who don't know how to cook? What about the people who don't have capacity to cook? Well, I feel that the food industry has also exploited that we have such a diffuse and widespread executive dysfunction and cognitive overload. I mean, think about how bizarre it is, the amount of people in in the country that don't have capacity to cook. That is an engineered problem, that is not an individual failing, that is not a like a family culture problem, you know. That is something that the system and the forces that be have created, you know, and that's part of what makes this food environment so tumultuous and disgusting. Our food preferences, you know, I truly it's funny, like navigating cravings and talking about cravings our bodies never need like a Cheeto, you know. Our bodies do not need a Hershey bar, you know. And this brings me back to what we were talking about in the beginning of this conversation. We're so disconnected from our nutritional intelligence, we're so distrusting of our body, we don't understand how all of this is connected. So we just do what's best. And it's like, that's okay. I'm not shaming anyone. I'm not blaming anyone. You know, there are days where I look for some sort of processed food because I'm like, damn, I did a really bad job at meeting my nutritional needs. I'm going to eat this and then move on. You know, I'm going to do better in 60 seconds from now, and do better in the context of, like, what I know my body needs, and I'm still learning. We're all perpetually learning. But I think that the food industry and a lot of these ultra processed foods, they've made it unnecessary for us to learn all of this, you know, because it's like, well, we can stay alive, you know, because the food is here and this sentence is here, and it's like, let's really look at what has happened to the culture, you know, let's really look at how these food companies have essentially created an essential need for their products to exist, because our economic system is blowing out our minds and overwhelming our bodies to the extent where we can't prepare food. And I think that's that's gross. I think it's an injustice, and I hate it here.

Jess Aldredge  53:21  
No, it's sad, and it's exactly you said people can survive off these foods, but you know how many people are not thriving, including children. And you know our obesity rates are staggering, and you know all of that, but I wanted to make sure before we end this, that we get into because you brought this up and you said, we can get into it. And I would love, I would hate, to end without talking about it, because so much of your page talks about executive functioning and capacity, I'd love to dive into that a little bit more kind of, in regards, or along with, along the lines of, excuse me, of the neurobiology of grief and how grief and PTSD really do impact our executive functioning skills, our capacity and ability to meet nutritional needs.

Timothy Frie  54:00  
Yeah, well, maybe I can start by just defining executive functioning. So executive functioning is this, I think there's about 10 different executive functions the way I think about them, but it's basically how we make decisions and organize and plan things, and what's called rank ordering, you know, putting things in order. Okay, this is more important than this. I need to do this before that. It's how we make decisions about our day and about just how we make decisions period. A lot of it happens in the front part of our brain, which is also where a lot of things happen as a result of trauma and just chronic stress in general, and grief, which I'll jump to in a minute, when we if you were to Google and look up a definition of executive function. You're probably not really going to find like preparing meals, cooking meals, making a grocery list, cleaning up after the meal, following a recipe, all of the thing, grocery shopping, you know, all those things, you're not going to find them as examples. I don't know why, but again, it's like one of these fundamental. Aspects of our life that is just not don't really have the context there. So executive dysfunction is when you know our ability to do all this planning and organizing and ranking and things and make decisions logically becomes dysfunctional. I can't think of a single illness that you know common, like cardio metabolic disease, type two diabetes, depression, anxiety, OCD, I can't really think of anything, and even many autoimmune diseases. Executive dysfunction has been implicated. People with certain ACE scores are more likely to experience executive dysfunction. And executive dysfunction is so common in grief and during major life transitions or any, any, any stressful periods. We have this cognitive overload, the range trying to compensate, and things just become more difficult and heavy to do and hard to do. And grief is, is one of those life experiences that, my gosh, we don't understand it, but we also we do. There is a really good understanding of it, but culturally we don't understand it. There is a researcher whose work I have been such a fan of and have learned and grown so much from. Her name is Mary Frances O'Connor, and she is a neurobiologist or neuroscientist from University of Arizona. Her lab is called the Glass Lab. I think it's grief. And she has spent a lot of her career looking at the grief experience, and she did one of the first functional imaging studies looking at the grieving brain and what's happening in people that are grieving. And she created this really beautiful theory called the gone but never forgotten theory, and what's happening in the brain during grief is this mismatch, kind of what I alluded to earlier, where we have the brain has all these predictive maps and all this predictive encoding is happening about this person. About this person or this job or this place or this setting being a consistent part of our existence. When it's gone, the brain has a really tough time grappling with that, and it's so hard that it causes a lot of systemic response. You know, there's all kinds of different immune responses and responses and hormonal responses to grief that are no different from any other major life stressor. And it might be a reach to compare it to trauma, but dramatic grief is a thing if there is loss in grief associated with a trauma. And look, some researchers have have posited that trauma is an autoimmune or an immunological disorder, you know, like the immune response, the neuro immune response, is so profound, one of the ways this manifests is this executive dysfunction. You know, the takeaway here is just any major life transition or any big train change, I think we hold ourselves to the standard where it's like, okay, I'm just going to keep it all together. I'm going to act like none of this is happening. I need to be able to bounce back. I got three days of bereavement. I got to hurry up and get all this grief out in three days. In three days and go back to work. I'm going to change jobs, I'm going to move I'm going to adopt a child, go through custody changes, I'm going to, you know, all of these huge things, and we just get up and act like our body isn't experiencing this. And I mean, it's so common to experience appetite changes during grief or any major life transition. It's very common for a chronic pain intensity to increase. It's very common to have an exacerbation of a chronic illness when you're going through these life changes. And I think for most of us, we just never really again. We're not attuned to these connections between what's happening inside our body and outside of our body. And grief is another one of those experiences where we just kind of don't know what to do with it. And I think, you know, you can go into the literature right now, and it's alarming to me, there's nothing. I mean, there's, there's a handful of papers about grief and nutrition, but that's something else we're not learning about. And that is why, in the neuro nutrition, I don't want to harp on this too much, but, you know, there's an entire unit on grief and the neurobiology of grief and what that means, you know, for nutritional behavior, because it was important for me in my journey. You know, when I think about the year I lost my grandmother, same year all this started, you know, I truly thought that I had, like, insulin lymphoma and on Hodgkin's lymphoma, or I developed lupus or something. I felt horrible, you know. And you know, getting all these tests and everything, and nobody ever explaining to me that could be grief. It could be the meaning of this loss. The last thing I'll say here is, you know, whether it's grief or trauma, developmental trauma or, you know, whatever the context, we don't necessarily have to talk about it, I think, to recover from it or grow beyond it, but we need to make sense of it, and we need to understand what those experiences mean and how they show up, which is why I say all the time like need and deserve, to understand how our life experiences have shaped our relationship with food, because if you don't, it is impossible to take care of yourself, and that's all I want to teach people How to do take care of themselves.

Ashley Ihemelu  59:41  
You you emphasize the importance of defining safety before jumping into nutrition fixes and healing. How do you help someone reclaim that safety? Just to give our listeners, maybe a little tip into because we talk about safety a lot, how.

Timothy Frie  59:59  
What does it even mean, right? So I think, you know, there's this, you know, in biology and neurobiology, there's this concept like organismal safety. Kind of makes me think about cell danger response, which I would succinctly define as like, all of the evolutionarily programmed ways that our cells respond to some sort of stress or a threat or an insult, hundreds of things that happen in the cell danger response that is really at the core of a lot of the pathology and disease that we see, regardless of the context. The CDR is at the core of that. I think we need to think about what's most accessible to someone like I said earlier, like, where is entry point? And for most people who have experienced trauma, they've been very disconnected. They have a lot of that interoceptive blunting. You know, they have trouble hearing and deciphering and responding to their body signals. They may not trust themselves. Maybe they have experienced Association and depersonalization or derealization or something like that. If you're in a space where you you have a handle on that, it's all about noticing your body again and truly just going like hunger, that's thirst, that's joy. Oh, I experience a lot of hunger between one and three. I experience a lot of hunger when I go to the gym and I don't eat after the workout. I don't feel very hungry when my husband gets home from work and he's yelling and screaming at the kids, or, you know, whatever it is, I don't feel very hungry when I'm homeschooling my kids, because that's a lot, and that's stressful. We have to get those basic observations. So we do these, like in of one or one participant studies with people, and that's really all I feel like I do any thing that I've done with with people, one on one. I feel like I'm holding a lantern up, you know. And I'm just like, oh, look over there. What's that? Oh, too scary. Okay, let's look over here, a problem. And sometimes you'll be like, Oh my God, it's a snake and like, that's a twig. Like, let's look at it again, you know. And I think for practitioners having that therapeutic alliance, just to simply witness that growth and that work is what's powerful for people. Because, you know, when I first started doing this work, I'm like, Oh my God, is it? God, is it really just a matter of guiding, you know, like, because I was so used to all the protocols and the tests and interpreting data, and, you know, again, there's a time and place for that, and we can work with all of that. For most people, it really is about building self trust. But before you can have that self trust, I think there needs to be a practice of self curiosity, and what masks the curiosity is self criticism and deprecation and all the ways we've internalized. It's like, why can't I be curious about myself? I'm disgusting and I hate the way that I look, and I can't do this, and I can't do that. Can we become curious about that instead, without shaming ourselves and guilting ourselves. And, you know, depending on, you know what your profession is, you know, like for me, that's not areas where I go. You know, as a neuro nutritionist, there are therapists who can really dive into this. You know, there are coaches that you know know how to support people through this. There's even personal trainers who you know are working with people who they're not sorting through this, but in their own way, they're teaching people how to notice their body in the moment and how it shows up in space and proprio reception, you know, and all that. So it's going to depend on the person, but I think the prerequisite to feeling safety and creating, cultivating safety in your life, giving yourself permission to do that, is to have a practice of curiosity,

Jess Aldredge  1:03:21  
boil down very complex topics and make it so simple. Because these things, as a culture, we make everybody that we've talked to just these simple things of noticing and just starting there. So I love that. Love for you to be able to share about your program who it's for more about it, and then other ways that people can find you and perhaps work with you.

Timothy Frie  1:03:41  
My goal for this program is for people to have a paradigm shift in how they see this relationship of, you know, how does the nervous system influence what we eat, and how will we eat influences the nervous system? Because it's I just, I can't emphasize the power of that, you know, in my own life and in other people's life the way that I've witnessed that. And I think Not to disparage any training or do a lot of contrasting, but a lot of the food is medicine, nutritional psychiatry, metabolic psychiatry, functional medicine. A lot of these trainings are very protocol based. And with neuro nutrition, I want to enable people to start noticing these relationships and these connections. Because, like, like, you just said, Jess like, they're so powerful just being able to notice that. But when we get very stuck in these protocols and these rigid plans, we can lose sight of these simple things that can have profound implications for people. So you know what I what I want people to come away with is a new way of thinking about not only the people they're working with, but also themselves and and this relationship with food. So, you know, the program is basically broken into three different domains. There's foundations domain where we're we cover a lot, but we're going over like neurophysiology and neuroanatomy, all different hormones and. You know, the, what I call the neurobiological Nexus, how things are connected, nutrition behavior, nutrition psychology, so we get the kind of base of knowledge, and then we move into very specific categories of health conditions like depression, anxiety, trauma, grief, autoimmunity, neurodegeneration and things like that. And my hope is that, you know, people will be able to find common threads and be able to take these, these small things that can have big implications for people, and integrate it into their practice. And I designed the program to be applicable for all kinds of different practitioners working with different populations. So, you know, we have, there's physicians in the program, there's naturopathic doctors or speech and language pathologists. There's an acupuncturist or food scientists in the program. We have a medical illustrator coming into the program, and there's health and wellness coaches, nutritionists, dietitians, you know, therapists, psychologists. There's, there's space for this. And I think that it's, you know, neuro nutrition is something that needs to be standard of care. You know, we people need and deserve to understand this, to take care of themselves. So, you know, the you can just go to neuro nutrition.org, depending on, you know, when this episode is released, we may or may not have the full website up. We've done all this without even a fully functioning website, which is beyond me, that's the best place to learn more about that. And then, you know, to learn more about me. I don't do a ton of long term one on one. Work with clients. I work with a very specific population of people now at like, four week intensives that are people who share a lot of my lived experience. They're usually late diagnosed autistic people with ADHD, experience complex trauma, they have disordered eating, and they're finally like, I'm over this. How can I eat with fluency? That's an application only program. My capacity is very limited for that. You know, I might take one or two new clients every other month for that. But if you want to learn more about me or that, you can just go to timfry.com and connect with me on Instagram, anywhere you'd like

Ashley Ihemelu  1:07:03  
thank you so much, Tim for sharing your brilliance with us. Like Jess said, You boil down really complex things into attainable action items, and we really appreciate appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us today.

Timothy Frie  1:07:18  
Thank you. I feel like it is brevity, and being concise is not a skill of mine, so to hear that this is coherent and making sense and is simple means a lot to me. So thank you, and I really appreciate this. This is something I think everybody needs and deserves to learn about, and I appreciate this platform and the opportunity to talk about this. It's very grateful for this. So thank

Jess Aldredge  1:07:38  
you. Thank you so much.

Matt  1:07:40  
Thanks for listening to wellness. Reality Check for more. Go to wellnessRealitycheck.com. You.